Europe’s Juice space mission blasts off toward Jupiter

The ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer mission — ‘Juice’ — successfully launched today from Europe’s spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana.     The launch was supposed to take place yesterday but was postponed due to poor weather conditions.  Today, the stars aligned and Juice was successfully blasted into orbit at approximately 14:19 CEST. It took only two minutes for the Ariane 5 rocket to transport Juice into space, shortly after which it separated from the satellite, which now begins its 8-year journey to Jupiter.   Juice will make the 6.6 billion km trip to study three of Jupiter’s 92 known moons: Ganymede,…

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